Ties That Bind
by piper maru duchovny
Summary: It was just a few scraps of useless leather before she came along and made it into something beautiful. - Hank/Karen, pre-series into season one. Strong T.


**I've been toying with this fic ever since I saw Hank's bracelet in the Californication merch store. It's my first attempt at Cali fic so please judge accordingly. **

**Disclaimer: I own not a damned thing.**

It was just a useless piece of leather before her fingers picked it up and changed it into something beautiful. She had tied it around his wrist using two fingers and her teeth because her other hand was halfway down his pants due to second trimester hormones. He had pulled up short at his new adornment and raised an eyebrow at her just as she launched into one of her diatribes about living in the urban jungle filled with wild pussy and she just needed to claim him. He laughed and called her primal, his cave woman, and then he let her mark his body however she pleased because, god, he hated being caged but belonging to her somehow didn't seem so bad.

He'd temporarily lost it when Becca was ten and they were fighting – again. He was behind on a deadline and she was working on a remodel, they had been communicating through their spawn for weeks and missing each other led to tension which gave way to their usual explosion. It was a process they went through every couple years and Hank almost looked forward to because afterward they sent the offspring to her godparent's and fucked it out all night long to some Sabbath at max volume. He would dig his fingers into her upper thighs and she'd bite his shoulder until it bled as she crashed down around him in that glorious way of hers. But if he had lost that bracelet? He and his boner would be out on the streets for life, he was certain.

Becca had stolen the leather strap when she'd found it on the bathroom counter – he'd started taking it off for showers because the leather was growing weak and he was afraid it'd disappear down the drain. He had found her laying on her bed, rubbing the leather between her fingers and listening to his old Nirvana records. He had fallen down beside her on her twin bed and busied himself with her tangled hair as she confessed her thievery – she had been enamored by the jewelry, confused by how he could be so attached to some leather her mother had braided together over a decade ago but he couldn't get his shit together long enough to tell Karen he loved the fuck out of her. It was the first time he had heard his angel swear and it brought him to his knees outside the little girl's room. God, he sucked as a father sometimes and as a not-husband even more.

That night he had marked Karen back. He was physically incapable of marriage, there was just some sort of block inside him that couldn't meld to the archaic convention. He would never be able to put a ring on her finger but, oh, he could tattoo his love across her person with his teeth, his fingers, his words spilled right into her mouth as he pinned her to their bed.

Three pieces of leftover leather cording from some project she'd been working on when she had told him that she was pregnant with the best thing either of them had ever done with their lives. It had become so much a part of him, melded with his being, his skin growing around it and accepting it as part of his body. He could not bring himself to take it off when Karen had left him for that wankfest, Bob – Bill, jesus, he knows the bastard's name but it makes the bile rise in his throat to say. He wanted to, christ, he wanted to rip it off and throwing it into the pacific then himself in after because life without Karen was just... wrong. What was the point? Fuck. She was marrying someone else, someone with the balls to put a ring on her finger, and he still couldn't bring himself to take the fucking bracelet off. He was at her wedding and all he'd managed to do was tuck it up under the sleeve of his dress shirt.

Becca finds it when they're dancing; the teenager curls her fingers around it and worries the worn leather between her fingers as she presses her face against his shoulder and breathes shakily. He knows. He wants to cry too. All he can do is wrap his free arm around her and kiss her head. He should promise that it's all going to be okay but he's broken too many promises to her already. Now, he's just sorry. Sorry that he can't give his baby her happy ending.

Then Karen is in his car and then she's in his bed, in every nook and cranny of his life all over again. She's marking him with her teeth as her hips cant into his, rolling in that familiar way as he makes her back arch, branding her hips with the curl of his fingers. She scrapes her nails down his arms and pauses when she runs into the familiar fabric. Everything pauses for a long second as he gasps for breath and she looks at him like she could fall into him and never come out. She falls into him and he feels a few hot tears at his shoulder. "You never took it off, did you?"

"I couldn't," he breathes at her temple.

"I love you too," she mumbles into his shoulder as she falls apart.


End file.
